Anthropocentric Robotics

The focus of the Anthropocentric Robotics Project is on the importance of understanding people in order to build better robots. The goals of the project are to develop a “cognitive model” of how people understand robots, to integrate knowledge about this model into robotic systems, and to evaluate the effectiveness of this integration in improving human-robot interactions. At the present time, the Anthropocentric Robotics Project involves three studies of human-robot systems: a study of employees at NASA Ames and their involvement in the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission (completed), a study of museum employees and their interactions with the Personal Exploration Rover (completed), and a study of the interactions among scientists, roboticists, and a semi-autonomous rover as part of the Life in the Atacama project (in progress). Our next steps are to combine the results of these studies to generate a model of how people understand robots, to use this model to improve a robotic system, and to evaluate the impact of the use of the model on human-robot interaction. By better understanding people, we hope to generate quantifiable improvements in how well they are able to work with robots.